Mobile Spots – Does Size Matter?

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When you start one campaign, how do you decide which spot to launch? What is the importance of spots when you’re buying traffic? Do you adapt your media buy strategy to each spot?

Details can make a huge difference in a competitive world. Therefore, let’s identify the most common spots, their characteristics and understand how we should adapt our activity to maximize our profit margins. Mobile spots can vary a lot, depending on the ad network.

If you know the characteristics of each spot before you start working you’ll have the possibility of adapting your activity and have a better performance right from the beginning. By activity we mean bids, banner content and capping.

You should also understand how your campaign will work online and how the visitors will interact with your ads. On your side, you can also manage in each positions you will promote your ads near your public. You can also decide how many times you want your ads to appear and, most importantly, how your ads will be displayed. Remember that you can and should adapt both the content and language shown on the banners.

MOST COMMON SPOTS

We chose the next spots from a huge file, listed on several ad networks. In fact, we thought these ones could cover a wider range of possibilities because they are the most common mobile spots. The next definitions are based on our experience:

The first two spots are the riskiest ones:

Pop under – Why? Because users typically close the window before the offers appear. Moreover, it’s one of the most expensive spots due to the simplicity of its flow: your Landing Page appears right away on the pop as opposed to the banners, where the user needs to click on the banner in order for the LP to appear. You should balance your capping volume and take in consideration the minimum bid of the country where you are promoting so as to control your volumes and costs.

Redirection – Be careful with it. Redirections are very expensive because they have a direct flow. The user goes to a page and is automatically redirected to the offer. This flow is expensive because it guarantees that the users see the offers. However, the performance can disappoint because, as it happens with Pop unders, the users can easily close the window and ignore the new page.

300×250 – One of the most competitive spots. Indeed, almost all Media buyers start on this spot as it’s the one that has the most traffic. It’s hard to find a website that doesn’t have it. It’s difficult to conquer good positions here! You need to be very careful with your target. If you bid higher than you should, a little mistake can drive lots of traffic to a wrong feature and lose tons of money. From another perspective, with a perfect target, you should get more and more traffic to maximize your gains. Normally, this spot appears in the middle or bottom (when you scroll down the list of videos), in the bottom (multiple times) and Next-To-Video on websites that don’t have a mobile version. When your start exploring this spot, it’s good to be careful. Try doing something a bit differently so you can outsmart your competition. Most of all, be certain of your targeting before betting high.

300×100 and 305×99 – The second biggest spot, also present on almost all the websites. It is usually located on top of the page. The spot is the same but the pixels can vary between 300×100 and 305×99. Same philosophy as the 300×100/305×99.

728×90 and 468×60 – These banners appear on websites that don’t have a mobile version, so they can adapt to the screen size. These spots have good volumes and are usually consistent. Once you get good results in safer spots and have identified the most correct target, they are a way to increase traffic and obtain more good results. You can explore image or text banners here. Generally, these spots are on top of websites.

Text/Keywords – Text campaigns or keywords aren’t available on all ad networks. It usually has good results even though the competition is very high. You need to have a good CTR banner content and especially very curious and motivational words. These ads appear when the users type the “keywords” that you had selected for your campaign.

250×250 – The Square! It’s not a premium spot but you can use it to increase your traffic. It’s a mobile spot and fits in smaller places. You can usually find some 250×250 aligned on the top or bottom of the pages.

160×600 – Once again, here we have a non-mobile spot. It is big on the left and right sides of the page and generally uses a combination of images and text content, containing a question or a call to action promoting the offers content.

The last three spots are the safest ones. They are perfect for you to test geo countries in which you have good volumes and expensive traffic:

Instant Message (IM) – This spot generally doesn’t have huge volumes but has enough traffic to test new segments or new offers. It will appear as a new conversation window, normally at the bottom right, representing a conversation. You can apply text banners here.

In-Video – This is a tricky spot for users. You can use images or text banners here. The ad will appear above the video if the user pauses it.

Interstitial – Another tricky spot for users. When you click on a video to watch it, before reaching the video page, an interstitial page appears (normally per every two videos you want to watch). Try to promote images that adapt to each website so as to be more attractive.

INSIGHTS

Regarding our experience and results we think the next graph will provide you a clear image of these spots. We ordered them according to their risk as well as their competition volumes. The size of each bubble represents the volumes of each spot.

SO, DOES SIZE MATTER?

Let’s see how to apply these spots when you need to launch a campaign in the following situations:

Huge volumes and cheap (example: India)

Avoid the most competitive spots like 300×250 and 300×100. If the traffic is cheap you can go to medium spots to get some traffic but try to avoid the maximum competition until you actually understand the feature’s behavior.

Huge volumes and expensive (example: United States of America)

If the traffic is expensive try to get safer spots first. Launch an In-video, IM or Interstitial spot to get some volume. Optimize your traffic and test the offer(s). Delete features with lower performance before advancing to bigger spots.

Low volumes and cheap (example: Czech Republic) When the traffic is cheap you can go to the most competitive spots to get data. Indeed, if you want to explore a country with low volumes you should turn to these spots. You can launch a campaign using any spot.

Low volumes and expensive (example: Belgium)

When you have low volumes, you should take the most competitive spots. Not in this situation, though. If the traffic is expensive you should reconsider and launch other spots first. Examples of spots you can launch: In-video, IM or Interstitial to test the country and the offers.

Choosing a spot is an important decision!

You don’t have to be afraid of the competition, you just need to understand how to manage and treat each country and each segment according to the spot.

First, you always need to get data to analyze and to optimize your target. Then, you can go further to more competitive spots to get all the traffic you possibly can and increase your profit margins.

If you have any doubts or questions, please contact MOBIDEA online and chat with our marketing experts!